Herblock Loved the Little Guy and Hated Nixon’s Guts

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About halfway through the screening of the new documentary Herblock: The Black and the White, one of the closing entries in this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, it occurred to me that you haven’t really made it in America until someone has made a movie about you.

Three of the many talking heads in this documentary — reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and former executive editor Ben Bradlee of The Washington Post — have already been the subjects of a movie, the much-praised 1976 feature film All the President’s Men, which was based on Woodward and Bernstein’s book about the fall of President Richard Nixon. What’s more, the actors who played the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters in that movie — Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman — are the subjects of a new documentary about the making of the original feature film and the enduring fascination with Watergate. This new documentary is called, appropriately if unimaginatively, All the President’s Men Revisited. Stop the presses! Hollywood people never tire of talking about themselves and their achievements!

But back to Herblock. It’s a heartfelt, uplifting documentary about the legendary WashingtonPost cartoonist Herbert Lawrence Block, known universally by his nom de guerre, Herblock. Peppered with the predictable talking heads — though not Redford and Hoffman, mercifully — it tells the story of a self-effacing artist from Chicago whose patriotism, prescience, and deft pencil led American journalism’s charge against such bogeymen as Hitler (even before he was elected chancellor), the gun lobby, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, segregationists, big oil, big business, big military budgets, big money in politics (as early as 1950), the arms race, Stalin, the Vietnam War, and, most famously, Richard Nixon. Herblock drew McCarthy and Nixon with swarthy mugs, sweating, frequently crawling out of mud puddles or open sewer holes. Herblock coined the pejorative “McCarthyism,” and he hated Nixon’s guts and wasn’t shy about saying so. In our watered-down, fair-minded times, such venom is bracing.

In addition to all those talking heads, the documentary consists of many pictures of Herblock’s cartoons, interspersed with a long on-camera interview with him in his cluttered office at the Post. Dressed in his trademark baggy sweater, he comes across as a wise, witty uncle. “He worked until he died,” says one of the talking heads. Not quite. Herblock’s last cartoon appeared on Aug. 26, 2001, and he died six weeks later at 91, after working at the Post for 55 years and winning three Pulitzer Prizes, the Medal of Freedom, and an uncountable number of enemies among the rich, the powerful, and the corrupt.

The film makes the points that Herblock was always looking out for the little guy, that he was an ardent believer in the importance of a free press in a democracy, and that he enjoyed complete editorial freedom. This last point was not always the case. During the 1952 presidential campaign, the Post editorial board supported the Republican candidate, Dwight Eisenhower. Herblock drew scathing cartoons of Ike, portraying him as an out-of-touch lightweight. When the Post started pulling his anti-Eisenhower cartoons, readers howled — and pointed out that Herblock was syndicated in hundreds of other papers and they would take their business elsewhere. The Post editors caved in, and Herblock was forevermore off the leash.

After the Herblock screening ended and the applause died, the documentary’s director and co-writer, Michael Stevens, stepped onto the stage to answer questions. First he introduced several people in the audience who were involved in making the movie, including Alan Mandell, who, it turns out, is an actor who played Herblock in those interview scenes in Herblock’s office. This bit of legerdemain was jarring — I had assumed I was watching the real Herblock on the screen, not a convincing look-alike. Was it dishonest of Stevens to put words in the mouth of an actor in a documentary, without alerting the audience? And where did those words come from — the dozen books Herblock published in his lifetime? Interviews he gave? Stevens’s imagination? I raised my hand but never got to ask my questions.

[Editor’s Note: Filmmaker Michael Stevens has pointed out to us that this question is answered in the film’s credits, which state: “starring ALAN MANDELL as HERBERT BLOCK based on the writings and speeches of HERBERT BLOCK”]

As I headed home from the theater, those unsettling questions were crowded out of my mind by a memory. One of my most prized possessions is a photograph that was taken in The WashingtonPost newsroom on election night in 1952, when I was three months old and an out-of-touch lightweight named Dwight Eisenhower was in the process of defeating Adlai Stevenson for the presidency. The photograph depicts a scene of great hubbub — reporters crowding around a messy table full of old newspapers and sandwiches and coffee cups, while a man pours coffee from a big white hobo pot. It’s not hard to imagine the clatter of typewriters, the screaming of telephones, the distant murmur of a police radio, the cigarette smoke bluing the air. It’s a man’s world, and for me there is only one man in it: the guy pouring the coffee: my father.

I love the details of that photograph. The map of the world on the wall. The copy spike on the cluttered table. The milk in glass bottles. The lovingly wrapped sandwiches. The stacks of china cups and saucers. And, above all, my father’s patent-leather hair, his French cuffs, the dainty way he holds the coffee pot’s lid with his left pinkie as he pours for his fellow newsmen. That picture seems like an artifact from some prehistoric age.

My father was a respected Post reporter and rewrite man at the time — “the fastest typist in the newspaper business,” as Bradlee, then a hard-charging fellow reporter, would later put it in his memoir, A Good Life. (Upon reading those words in the 1990s, my father, a proud man, had sniffed, “I like to think I was the fastest writer in the newspaper business.”) Bradlee does not appear in that election-night photograph. Neither does Herblock, who had his own office down the hall. But the most noticeable absence, for me, was not the men who have now been immortalized by movies; it was an old-school police reporter named Alfred E. Lewis who worked on a series of articles with my father that nearly won a Pulitzer Prize. Lewis spent 50 years as a lowly cop reporter at the Post, nearly as long as Herblock, without acquiring a fraction of the cartoonist’s fame or fortune.

The series my father and Lewis collaborated on was called “The Charmed Life of Emmett Warring,” about a powerful and slippery D.C. racketeer, a prime target in the Post’s campaign to root out police corruption. The articles ran on the front page every day for a week and jumped to two full inside pages, an astoundingly detailed and literary collaboration between a gumshoe street reporter and a lightning-fast rewrite man. Years later, after he had left the newspaper business, my father showed me a typed, single-spaced, two-page memo from his editor, spelling out the kind of detail he wanted in the series, right down to how many pairs of shoes Emmett Warring owned, what his house looked like, what brand of booze he drank, and how much of it. That memo is still astonishing to me — the realization that people cared so much and worked so hard at putting out a daily newspaper.

Bradlee, in his memoir, called Al Lewis “the prototypical police reporter, who had loved cops more than civilians for almost fifty years.” My father told me that Al Lewis had a hard time writing coherent English prose, but he knew every cop and every criminal in D.C., and he frequently beat the cops to the scene of a crime. In other words, he was an invaluable asset to the paper’s city desk. Twenty years after Ike’s victory, Lewis hadn’t lost a step.

On Sunday, June 18, 1972, the Post ran what appeared to be a routine breaking-and-entering story. It opened like this, straight, no frills:

5 Held in Plot to Bug Democrats’ Office Here

By Alfred E. Lewis, Post Staff Writer

Five men, one of whom said he is a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, were arrested at 2:30 a.m. yesterday in what authorities described as an elaborate plot to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee here.

It turned out that when Lewis arrived at the Watergate complex with the acting police chief several hours after the bungled burglary, he sailed past the roped-off reporters outside the building and went right up to the crime scene, where he gathered vital color and details. Eight other reporters contributed legwork to Lewis’s report in that Sunday’s paper. One was a hungry young hun named Bob Woodward; another was “Peck’s bad boy,” in Bradlee’s words, a renegade named Carl Bernstein. At the time no one appreciated the story’s implications. But it’s a safe bet that the Post’s first Watergate story would not have had such punch and detail without the contacts and legwork of an old-school cop reporter named Al Lewis. And no one connected the mushrooming scandal’s dots more quickly than Herblock.

Herblock is a welcome reminder that there was a time, not so very long ago, when American newspapers were stocked with people like Herb Block and Al Lewis and Dick Morris, men and women who were passionate about producing quality journalism and didn’t give a thought to ratings, celebrity, blog hits, or search engine optimization. Today, even a superb investigative reporter like Bob Woodward has been neutered by the seductive fame and money that fester inside the Beltway. People in America are still producing quality journalism, but, like serious fiction, it is being pushed deeper and deeper into the margins of the culture by forces that seem unstoppable.

All the more reason to remember and celebrate faceless foot soldiers like Al Lewis. I say he deserves to be the subject of a documentary or feature film at least as much as the far more decorated Woodward and Bernstein and Bradlee and Herblock. I have a strong hunch that Herblock, that great champion of the unsung little guy, would have agreed with me.

Bill Morris
is a staff writer for The Millions. He is the author of the novels Motor City Burning, All Souls’ Day, and Motor City, and the nonfiction book American Berserk. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Granta, The New York Times, The (London) Independent, L.A. Weekly, Popular Mechanics, and The Daily Beast. He lives in New York City.

One of the most morally and aesthetically interesting aspects of Werner Herzog's 2005 documentary film Grizzly Man, the enchanting and bizarre tale of Timothy Treadwell's life and death among the grizzlies, is Herzog's decision not to include the existing audio of Timothy Treadwell and Aime Huguenard's deaths. Treadwell and girlfriend Huguenard were eaten by a grizzly bear while living amongst the grizzlies in Alaska in the summer of 2003. Treadwell's video camera (at least its audio function) was on while the two were being attacked and this audio is now in the possession of one of Treadwell's friends. Herzog himself listens to the footage in Grizzly Man, and though viewers cannot hear it, they see Herzog listening to it, and hear him tell the audio's owner that the recording should be destroyed.A strict empiricist would disagree: If we are to understand an event or a life we must examine all of the evidence, however gruesome. But then, artists are not lawyers or scientists, and artistic justice is rather another thing than scientific or legal justice. Herzog's choice not to include the audio recording of these two surely horrific deaths is a question that many artists are confronted with. What aesthetic and ethical effects will the representation of a certain act, particularly something like dismemberment or rape, have on my audience? Will the representation of such acts necessarily invoke responses of arousal or morbid fascination in the viewer? While this might serve the purposes of certain artists intent on impressing upon us as visual consumers our complicity with the rapist, voyeur, or bear, it becomes deeply problematic when the artist does not want us to identify with the assailant.Those who have read J.M. Coetzee'sDisgrace will know that the horror of a traumatic event that goes undescribed is not lessened, as will those who have read Samuel Richardson'sClarissa (1748). Sometimes referred to colloquially as "The Rape of Clarissa," Richardson's nearly 1600 page novel does not actually describe Clarissa's rape. It is through Clarissa herself that we get the novel's only approximation of a description of the event and her drug-addled memories are described only vaguely - shadows, a candle, the prostitutes (who, we later learn, held Clarissa down for her rapist). Richardson's choice to refuse description, like Coetzee's, is an ethical choice. It is a choice that absolutely refuses to offer us the possibility of aesthetic engagement with monstrous acts. If literary and other fiction is, as some hold, a means of playing make-believe, of trying on alternate identities, artists who refuse to represent horrific acts tell us something in these refusals. They do not want us to imagine these things, they do not want to provide the means by which we will be implicated in dehumanizing other people (even if these people are only literary characters). Even to write descriptions of such events would be, to whatever degree, to aestheticize them. And to make a rape into an object of aesthetic contemplation, aesthetic pleasure, is a sort of crime.Sofia Coppola's 2006 Marie Antoinette is the most recent example of this phenomenon that I have encountered. Coppola uses artistic refusal in her decision not to represent any social reality beyond Versailles until the very end of the movie, and then, only slightly. Occasionally, a court character mentions unrest among the people, bread shortages, increased taxes, but no physical evidence of it ever invades Louis XVI's court until the film's end, when a crowd of peasants surrounds the palace. In one of the movie's final scenes, Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) goes out onto a balcony of the palace and we hear below her (and even see the torches, pruning hooks, and scythes - though not the faces - of) the people below her on the ground. The scene astonishes because through it we realize that Marie and Louis had no idea what was happening beyond Versailles - had no idea these people truly existed, much less that they existed in exigency and anger. They have never seen them - they did not physically exist until this moment when it is too late. And we are made, like the monarchs, to have no idea of the anger and suffering of their people (no visual idea at least, though we all know their eventual fate). Is this refusal unethical? Does it mask the suffering of thousands to force upon us sympathy for two thoughtless, pampered fools or does Coppola's demand that we understand the king and queen's ignorance press for an even more scrupulous definition of justice?In "Weighing In," Seamus Heaney invokes "the power/Of power not exercised": Sometimes we say more and say it better by refusing to speak.

6 comments:

Bill, thanks for the great article. I’m about your age and had no connection to newspapers except I read them as a kid. My dad would bring home the afternoon paper The New York Post (then politically the city’s most liberal paper) and one of the first things I’d turn to was Herblock. As a Nixon-hating kid in a Nixon-hating family and part of a Nixon-hating generation, we loved his cartoons. It was really the first taste I had of the acidly anti-conservative, anti-anti-communist viewpoint in what we’d call today mainstream media. I think Herblock may have unconsciously spurred us in our late 60s protests to say stuff that hadn’t been said before (“One two three four, we don’t want your fucking war” chanted proudly on the streets).

Loved this essay—and the drawing. Too bad Herblock checked out shortly before the terrorist attacks of 9/11. If he’d been around, maybe he would have used his pencil to short-circuit W’s wars, the longest, bloodiest and most misguided misadventures in our nation’s history. RIP, Herblock. You are missed.

I thought of Shirley Jackson’s short story "The Lottery" as I watched the opening sequence of Ex Machina, a new film by Alex Garland. Caleb, played Domhnall Gleeson, peers into his computer in a techy looking office. He receives a message that he has won a lottery. As text messages pour in to congratulate him and co-workers clap his back, a look settles onto his face. Just as the opening of "The Lottery" glorifies our pastoral past too perfectly with flowers, “blossoming profusely,” Caleb, lit by the glow of his screen, seems to question. In a post-Edward Snowden world where our identities are tracked and online movements are monitored, is there such thing as random selection?
After his win, Caleb is flown by helicopter to a remote spot in the mountains and told to follow the river, which isn’t easy with a rolling suitcase. He finds the house of the CEO Nathan, played by a perfectly hollow-about-the-eyes Oscar Isaac, and is asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Nathan’s house is actually a high tech research facility and Caleb has been brought in to conduct a test of a machine’s intelligence ability to pass as human, a Turing test. The rest film is structured around Caleb’s testing of Nathan’s artificial intelligence, Ava.
Ava, in a subtle performance by Alicia Vikander, is visibly robotic, though parts of her have soft, perfect skin. Her arms, legs, and waist show her mechanics, shaped curves hug her breasts and bum. When I first saw her, with my tongue in cheek I thought: Ah, a female character reduced to the important parts. And in this kind of reaction lies the cleverness of this film. It plays out as a test of theory of mind, or "awareness of mind" as the film calls it -- the ability to understand your own beliefs, intents, and desires, but also to understand that someone else has a different set of the same.
Robin Dunbar, a British evolutionary psychologist who specializes in primate behavior, studies how we hold several people’s intentions in our minds at the same time. In his book, Lucy to Language, he uses the example of Othello, that the plot requires audiences to understand, “that Iago intends that Othello imagines that Desdemona is in love with Cassio.” William Shakespeare requires the audience to understand four levels of mental representation. He raises it to a fifth level when, “Iago is able to persuade Othello that Cassio reciprocates Desdemona’s feelings.” To Dunbar, that is how Shakespeare weaves a narrative spell.
Ex Machina works on a similar level. Without spoiling the plot, the fun of the film lies in that Nathan intends that Caleb imagines that Ava is or is not feeling about Caleb, who may or may not believe Nathan. Kyoko, Nathan’s servant becomes involved, the plot gets another twist.
Dunbar makes an interesting point about writing. Most of us can follow to the fifth level of intention and enjoy a good story. However, far fewer have the ability to compose an interesting tale because the fifth level is most people’s natural limit. The ability to work at the sixth level, what makes a really interesting story, is rare. Shakespeare was able to, “intend that the audience believes...” Garland also successfully works a level higher and this is where the film soars. In taking and subverting current ideas about gender, sci fi, and the thriller genre, he gives us a sharp tweak and delivers a film about theory of mind that is deliciously hard to read.
Garland is author of The Beach, a novel that defined the darker side of backpacking in the 1990s and later became a movie staring Leonardo di Caprio. His next novel, The Tesserat, was called “taut, nervous and often bloody,” by The New York Times and was an early sign of his willingness to play with structure. He wrote the script for Danny Boyle’s28 Days Later and adapted Kazuo Ishiguro’sNever Let Me Go for the screen.
As an Ishiguro fan, I asked Garland about adapting Never Let Me Go. He was able to form an accurate belief about my intentions and said he felt “an acute sense of duty." He had moments where he wondered why he could not just leave it as a novel, but, as with any project he works on, “it’s not a calculation, it’s a compulsion. You do it because you have to.”
With Ex Machina, Garland wrote the script and directed the film as well. At first he said it was a bigger step to go from novelist to screen writer, whereas moving from writing to directing felt smaller. The more we talked, however, the more Garland came around to seeing his work in novels and on the screen as very similar: “You start with a blank page. You engage the imagination. The problems of how it hangs together are the same.”
Like the best short stories, Ex Machina is sparse, taut, and precise. Every word of dialogue has weight and each shot has a purpose. As with Jackson's "The Lottery," the film ultimately shows the power of thinking about what we are doing and why. While the action in Ex Machina shifts in sharp pivots, many of the scenes play out almost as if they are on the page with Caleb and Nathan debating the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. In other words, it’s fascinating.

Ken Burns’s series The Civil War turns twenty years old this month. A plain old documentary it isn’t; in fact, by the standards of most “historical” documentaries, it lacks a certain testicular fortitude. It boasts neither flashy 3-D maps nor live-action re-enactments; what few live shots there are of battlefields were mostly taken after dusk, giving them a surreal, almost dreamlike quality. Its scoring is simple, its narration restrained. It is, well, rather bookish.
For starters, it is expansive in subject and magisterial (some might say boring, but then, people say thatabout books in general) in pacing. It has a distinctive style, both in terms of the visuals and the narration. It is split into chapters and sub-sections, with little digressions from the main narrative in between.
Like the back of a dust jacket, the film also parades out the literati. We hear quotations from Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, and John Stuart Mill; we see interviews with writers like Shelby Foote and William Safire; we even hear literary giants doing voice overs – Arthur Miller as William Tecumseh Sherman, Studs Terkel as Benjamin Butler, Garrison Keillor as almost everyone from New England, and Kurt Vonnegut, though his specific role isn’t listed.
Superficialities aside: The Civil War has an argument to make. It does not glorify its subject. As historian Barbara Fields puts it, the Civil War was an “ugly, filthy war with no redeeming characteristics at all.” And the documentary hammers that point home by placing all those stories of brilliant generalship and courage and gallantry alongside accounts and pictures of the human cost of “honorable manhood.” So, at the same time that we hear Stonewall Jackson proclaim that “God has been good to us this day” after the battle of Antietam – the bloodiest single-day battle in American history – the camera pans over rows of Confederate dead in Bloody Lane. And we hear Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s account of nightfall after the battle of Fredericksburg, during which time he and his decimated regiment huddled against the frozen ground, using dead bodies as protection against continuing Confederate fire, for as long as we hear about the battle itself.
But neither does it entirely vilify the war, Michael Moore-style. Instead, Burns casts the Civil War as an armed extension of a national conversation, one that touched on race, rights, justice, the organization of society, and much else besides. And Burns reminds the viewer that the center of the conversation – for all the talk of states’ rights, tradition, economics, electoral wrangling, and voter disillusionment – was always slavery.
It’s surprising, then, to be reminded that slavery was in the 1860s not a clear-cut moral issue, but a debated political topic. Burns throws cold water on abolitionists like Horace Greeley and even The Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, himself, as their political support for abolition wavers in the face of military defeats and an unpopular war. Conversely, he shows the conviction with which some Southerners clung to the wrong side of history, even those without a particular animus against slaves, such as Jefferson Davis, who called the Emancipation Proclamation “the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man.” Only former slave Frederick Douglass holds his course throughout the entire war; everyone else takes years to admit, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, that “emancipation is the demand of civilization; all else is intrigue.”
And it doesn’t rely on words alone to make the point that slavery was the issue of the war. For much of the first few episodes, we’re treated mostly to traditional European and American folk instruments – piano, fiddle, guitar, and the occasional brass band. But after the Emancipation Proclamation is announced in episode 3, we start to hear something new: the human voice. The episode ends with the Abyssinian Baptist Church Sanctuary Choir singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and from then on the music of gospel choirs begins to leaven all of the instrumentals. One colonel called the singing of freed slaves right after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued “the choked voice of a race at last unloosed”; Burns seems to have taken that to heart.
So The Civil War describes its subject as a story of national redemption that came close to failure many times. And he shows that all of the gentlemanly military stuff was a thin veneer of civilization over a five-year-long nightmare of butchery. It’s a brave argument to make, when so much of our collective memory of the Civil War has more to do with half-remembered textbook summaries and re-enactments – both live and on television – than with reality. And in an age where most historical documentaries are content to celebrate warfare, or wax nostalgic for a world in which moral issues were clear-cut, Ken Burns’s refusal to do so really does seem old-fashioned. But old-fashioned, in this case, is no bad thing.
Which makes The Civil War pretty book-like, in the best sense of the word. As novelist and professor of law Stephen L. Carter wrote, “Books are essential to democracy… Long books. Hard books. Books with which we have to struggle. The hard work of serious reading mirrors the hard work of serious governing—and, in a democracy, governing is a responsibility all citizens share. And if we are willing to work our way through difficult texts, we are far more likely to be willing to work our way through our opponents’ difficult ideas.”
In other words, The Civil War simply relies on a constant immersion in a world of challenging and complex ideas. And that makes it just like the best books out there.